Posted
by
Soulskillon Wednesday January 02, 2013 @12:07AM
from the also-known-as-the-post-duke-nukem-era dept.

An anonymous reader writes "PC Gamer has put together a huge list of PC games that are due to come out in 2013. They've broken out the lists by genre, and each list is pretty long. It looks like a good starting point for finding the games you want to keep an eye on. Here are some highlights: Star Wars 1313: 'Early glimpses suggest the game will ignore lightsabers and force powers in favor of gadgetry and guns, and the claims are for a more grounded and gritty fiction, instead of the fruity pan-galactic melodrama to which we are accustomed.' The Elder Scrolls Online: 'The real reason to watch The Elder Scrolls Online is the talent behind it – the ex-Mythic developers responsible for the innovative Warhammer: Age of Reckoning and, before that, Dark Age of Camelot. Don't write off the old-school MMO just yet.' Mars: War Logs: 'Say it with me: a cyberpunk RPG set on Mars. That's all you need to know.' Ring Runner: 'Missions challenge you to escape exploding trenches, battle bosses bigger than your screen, race against NPC pilots and engage in spectacular space skirmishes in an engine modeled on the laws of Newtonian physics.' There will also be new installments of Dragon Age, SimCity, Grand Theft Auto, StarCraft, Command & Conquer, and Everquest."

Oh come on, you're 2 years out of whack here. The current mantra is "console gaming is dying at the hands of tablets/phones/handhelds/PCs/free-to-play/lego (delete as appropriate). We might have missed it at the end of the PS2 era, but that's actually the traditional chorus of the latter part of a console cycle.

If you want to sing a rousing chorus of "PC gaming is dying" then wait until after the launch of the next Sony and MS consoles - everybody else will join in at that point.

The current mantra is "console gaming is dying at the hands of tablets/phones/handhelds/PCs/free-to-play/lego (delete as appropriate).

Some games involve picking or placing objects at a given position on the screen; these are ideal for a phone or tablet. Other games involve controlling a character that moves around; these are a bit harder to adapt. I understand how to simulate the directional pad or left stick with touch: find the direction between the initial point of contact and the current touch point. But I don't understand how to provide more than one fire button. In my tests on a Nexus 7 tablet, I couldn't reliably press multiple on-screen buttons without looking at them: I'd end up either pressing the inactive area between the buttons or pressing a button adjacent to the button I wanted to press. The cause is that on a console or a dedicated handheld gaming system, the player's thumb can feel the edge of each button. A phone or tablet, on the other hand, has a completely flat sheet of glass that provides no such feedback.

We already have a steampunk game set on Mars. Had it for a long time, too. It's even free on GOG.
Tho I preferred the installment with those dinosaurs in that valley which was forgoten by time. That one is free on GOG, too.

The Ultima series sure took you places. It all went downhill when they focussed on online gameplay and the accessible to the masses(ie cashgrab).

Ranting aside, the thought of Agatha Heterodyne on Mars appeals to me. It could be a mixture of The Incredible Machine and Mass Effect. With

Warhammer was huge fun at lower levels. I only leveled via PvP which was actually quite nice both in the closed battlegrounds and the open PvP lakes.
The PvE content simply didn't captivate me even tho I am a Warhammer junkie.
The MMO that was most like WoW but not WoW was actually Rift. It did a couple of things correctly and a couple of things like WoW. I had huge fun with it for about half a year.

The thing with MMOs is that 3-6 months is the max you can have fun with them. After that you will become ul

I'm done with the standard issue MMO. Personally, I'd like something like Shadowbane but with good graphics and an engine that can actually handle having hundreds of players in the same area for wars. That game was seriously fucking fun except for all the technical issues it had. There was leveling involved but it was fast and primarily just to acquaint you with your powers and build some cash.

My worry about TESO is that it won't be possible to mod. For me, a huge amount of the fun of the TES games is the modding community. There's also a lot of fun in abusing the console once you beat the game legitimately.

But most of all--bleh. I'm tired of MMOs at this point. I wasted enough months on WoW, and then another few on SWTOR. I had a lot of fun in both, but any new MMO would have to be radically different from the formula for me to be interested at all, especially if I'm expected to put up with

My personal worry about it is that they'll stop making single-player TES games after going MMO. Like WoW. Because WoW continued the lore line of War3 and beyond, there's no need and no point in making another RTS. Why would Bethesda make single-player games if they can include everything in their MMO through expansions?

Radically different? Personally I'd like to see the return of "sandbox" style MMOs like UO or SWG. Mythic did ok but I'd be more hopeful for TESO if they had gotten Raph Koster on board (he was involved in both UO and SWG, having designed most of the crafting system in the latter amongst other stuff). A good sandbox game is a "complete" game that caters to a wide variety of play styles: grinding, exploring, building, inventing, or just plain messing about. Besides interesting combat and questing, such a game has a strong crafting system but also things like player housing (and the ability to decorate them, a popular pastime in past sandbox games), a viable player-run economy (in SWG pretty much everything was player-made) and elements that make the game conducive to role-playing. Most players will want to engage in one of any of these play styles depending on their mood, and catering to all of them means your MMO becomes a place to hang out rather than just log on to for the next raid.

Good point about mods, though. Any game will go stale even to the most hardy fan, but you can prolongue their business (or get some fans to return) by adding new content. The problem is: it is rather expensive to develop such content. The company that manages to drive down the cost of developing new content while maintaining quality has the potential to create a winner, and player-generated content / mods could be part of that.

Perhaps 'tis not the MMO but the "grindfest" ye hath outgrown? What of "massively", "multiplayer" or "online" requires said grind?

I can remember my first MMOs: Offspring of the venerable MUD, the first MMOs were text based; The growth from "multiplayer" to "massively multiplayer" was simply due to the Internet's existence. Though the term MMO (MMORPG) hadn't yet been coined, they did exist and were played via Internet and its BBS portals even before the web came with it's standardized rich text and graphics capabilities. Many such games were evolved versions of (custom) MUDs. Many early MMOs had far less grind than many of todays' MMOs -- There was far less visual stimulus to distract you from boredom while you killed the statistically same foes over and over. Even the combat systems back then had to be more advanced and playful, incorporating full language parsing capabilities: "Blast the bastard!" and "Equip ranged weapon, then attack the Cyberknight." were both equivalent commands. Imagine what I could do today now that we have voice recognition... Having evolved over the years from my BBSs custom MUD, and text descriptions being cheaper and faster to make than graphics and audio, my own online RPG had "3D" worlds that eclipsed World of Warcraft in terms of size, narrative, and lore. My player power balance system relied more on combining effects of various weapons, items and modular upgrades (for cyborgs) or spells (mages) than the length of time you spent earning them. This along with planetary phases and attributes of the very locations added enough variety that even novices had a chance against seasoned players. You had to be smarter about using your stuff to win. There was no level cap needed, you can only carry so much stuff, and it's the combinations of stuff, not the price that gave power. The overarching gameplay was more about exploring an evolving world, and discovering the new untold stories, and also the roots of legends. I tried to make it like a good book, but where a book ends leaving you wanting more story, an MMO can continue: A digital text-based world can be so quickly and simply crafted and re-shaped and distributed.

The point is: "Grind" wasn't in my vocabulary... "Hack" and "Slash" were. Think about it: MMORGPs came from MORPGs (graphical MUDs) the latter of which came from RPGs -- Having ran many a dice & paper RPG campaign I knew that it was the new and compelling story which unpredictably changed due to interactivity that made such games magical -- Not hacking or slashing.

Nowhere is it writ that Grind be integral to MMOs. Indeed, much like in D&D, in my text based worlds charisma, zeal, and niceness of the players would often yield the fastest path to power vs grinding through quests. Eventually I will resurrect those gone but not forgotten worlds, but not today. It's the many comments like yours that reinforce my hunch that the world isn't quite ready yet -- Folks are already focusing less on the gimmick of graphical fidelity, even enjoying "pixel art" again. The subscription extending act of grinding is becoming tiresome to many. Now I'm waiting for folks to remember how to have fun, and expect it from games -- to remember how to play instead of grind, and not shun entire genres due to prevailing, yet fleeting, gameplay designs.

The first modern-ish MMO I can remember was BTechMUSE, which drew you hexmaps of your view. And there were clients that would read an alternate interface and draw you a GUI, I used one on the Amiga. They couldn't handle the load though. I was in a battle with over 100 players, it was aaaaagony. I did manage to take out something big (mauler? atlas?) by repeated DFA with a spider though, glorious.

...that rather sounds like Skyrim with every nude mod installed. With the naughty-boy-needs-chastizing animation pack. The dildos are pinker and bigger than in Saint's Row.
Writing dirty Elder Scrolls fanfic is like farting next to a cow. Utterly pointless since you have already been outdone even before you started.

There's always going to be some kind of grindfest when you compete against other players in terms of in-game character development. The only games that would lack that, are ones that don't have character's grow and develop, or have a very small growth range. Otherwise you'll always be grinding to beat that guy who's slightly better than you.

There are a lot of people who like that range of growth, and find the grindfest a worthwhile penalty for it.

Oh gawd, how awful is next installment going to be after the abortion the second one was. Frankly, 2012 is going to be a tough year to beat, so many spectacular titles came out. The first real year that I was looking to so many releases.

Frankly, 2012 is going to be a tough year to beat, so many spectacular titles came out.

I'm not sure if this is sarcasm or not. Personally, I felt that 2012 was one of the worst years for gaming in recent memory. So i'll just ask the question that was begged: Care to name a few of these spectacular titles? Maybe I missed some of them.

I disliked a couple of those, and a few more I didn't play, but the rest are awesome. Add to that list Stealth Bastard, To the Moon, and a handful of decent console ports, twenty other games I'm forgetting right now, and it's been a hell of a year to be a (PC) gamer.

IMO, a real contender for GOTY for 2012 would be a free flash game (no, wait, it doesn't suck! Really!) cal

The PC resurge is due to cheap and easy distribution with no cash barrier to get your stuff on services. AAA quality stuff gets released for 20 bucks. Steam shovels games by the metric crap ton. Then march over to GOG and marvel at their prices for the newish stuff they have. 3 bucks for the original Witcher? Yes, please. Then return to Steam and grab a couple of Jensens and Batmen for the price of a nice evening at the movies. Or read RPS for whatever tickles your fancy and swing over right to the developers homepage and grab the game for the cost of a packet of cigarettes. I've just finished LA Noire picked up at a bargain price and enjoyed every bit of it(except the driving sequences, skipped those).

Gabe "The Gabe" Newell said that game piracy was a service problem and boy did he show them. Next thing will be free money hats in TF2. For everybody.

"PC gaming is dead", by Simon Cowell's codpiece, nothing could be wronger.

Here's a real cracker: Digital sales still aren't included in all game sales statistics. So by applying Hollywood logic, all non-boxed instances of played games flow nicely into the piracy statistic. And therefore piracy is rampant on PC, so we need more DRM. Except most indies don't have that. Which is why the indie devs must have starved yonks ago. And it must be their dessicated corpses who made the also massively pirated sequels to their massively pirated first installments. Zombie indies want your brains! Fight the Zombie indies! Buy Activision, EA, UBI! For the children!

2012 wasn't too shabby if you stayed clear of the AAA titles.
On the indie side of things you got the likes of Torchlight, Yet another Orks must Die, The Walking Dead, lots of puzzle plattformers...
On the AAA side of the equation only Dishonored and XCom spring to mind.
Oh, and Diablo 3 also started releasing its first betas this year.

With the current sales going on I find that I am still catching up with 2010. If you are on PC then you'd need to be stark raving mad to buy a game right after release. Jus

Yep. If you are sane then you will pick up games a year after they were released with all DLC at half the price and most of the bugs ironed out.
In that respect I was severely bitten by HOMMVI, Bats: ACity and Diablo3. Preordered those. Should have known better since all 3 franchises have had a troubled history. And Diablo3 his the worst offender since it has fallen into the hands of people who thought that Diablo was about competitive gameplay. Which it never was. Design bugs never get ironed out. HOMM6 ju

I did a big journal post on my favorite (and least favorite) games of 2012 here [slashdot.org]. Obviously, not all of the games I liked will be everybody's cup of tea, but there were a couple of absolute stand-out titles, such as Borderlands 2, Farcry 3 and XCom.

Also some crushing disappointments, of course, particularly Mass Effect 3, but that's true of any year.

BioWare is dead (also Westwood Studios says "Hi!"), it's EAWare now, with everything that implies. We had better get used to it. I have rather low expectations for their games now (good production quality but generic gameplay, I rather have the other way around if I can't have both).
Didn't know Wasteland 2 was coming out this year though, and a new isometric Divinity game. Maybe we'll get some good RPGs this year for a change...

Actually, I'm vaguely optimistic for Dragon Age 3. Some of the early preview stuff and developer interviews make me suspect that they've learned some hard lessons from their last couple of games.

Dragon Age 2 was undeniably a mistake. There was actually some interesting stuff in there (the story had a lot of potential), but it lacked a clear direction guiding the gameplay mechanics and it blatantly needed another 6 months at least of development time to get some additional content (particularly environments)

Dragon Age 2 had some funny moments. Like when you found a random skeleton in a random dungeon and got a quest to take it to a random person. You gave him the bones and he thanked you and gave you some gold. And that's what 50% of the quests in the game were like. Was it done just to inflate the 'quest count'? They could have just given the gold to a random monster, but instead they created a pointless 'quest' just to show off how generic their game is.

I'm torn about that. I'm not entirely convinced that David Braben is to be trusted with something as precious as the Elite series.Davids are not to be trusted with games. It has been proven time and again that smart Dereks are better suited to the task of tackling starships. In space!

All snark aside I have been suckered out of my money the very instance Braben popped up next to Elite on Kickstarter. If anything then the drama value alone is worth the price of admittance.

's SimCity, but partially on the cloud. The design seems to be heavily multiplayer-centric, although it's possible to play solo, and you cannot play the game offline.

So it's entirely on the cloud, and the game disc only contains a client? Thanks for clearing that up.

It's to be seen if the co-op elements and novelty make it worth the purchase, or if the lack of offline play and multiplayer-centric design turns off too much of the player base for the co-op to make up for it.

No, no it isn't. If you can't play offline it's not worth buying. I am still playing my old SimCity games even though they are, well, old. I am not about to pay for a game like this. I would play on a free-to-play basis, but I am not dumb enough or rich enough to throw my money away on something I don't actually own. Not again, anyway, after buying HL2 on disc in the store. I still have (slim) hopes that law

you cannot play the game offline.
Oh, that is a shame. I have been a constant fan of Simcity and have had and played many many hours on every version to date. Unfortunately, I guess I won't be playing this one. I have no interest in playing online with other people and no interest in a piece of software that I have bought and paid for that is not payable because they choose to shut down a server.

What everyone should most be concerned about is the lack of PC focused design in games. All the games we're getting are designed for the lowest common denominator, while there may be a lot of games being released their generic design leaves a lot to be desired.

I don't play games, like ever. Last game I played was Age of Empires (original) and the Sim City's on my Apple.

I was excited for the new Sim City, and was going to buy a few copies for myself and my girlfriend. But after following the Reddit AMAA from the Maxis developers [reddit.com] and their complete dodge of answering any questions regarding the totally stupid online only DRM that's being built into the game.

I'm no longer excited for the game and will not be buying it.

How many of these games on this list are purely online DRM playable only?

I would like to play games on airplanes. I'd like to while away the spare hours in a hotel room with games.

Unfortunately, few planes have WiFi, and even if they do it's usually too unreliable for online DRM. Worse are hotels, which charge exorbitant fees for internet access, often on the order of $10 per hour, particularly in some countries like New Zealand where there are ZERO free access points, and hotels seem to make their profit entirely from overcharging for access.

Game publishers basically tell people like me: don't buy our games -- even our single player games -- because you can't check in with us every 5 seconds, so you must be some sort of dirty pirate.

There are plenty of games about that don't require internet access. They might not be the big blockbuster stuff, but they are *good* games nonetheless.

On the entirely separate problem of rip-off hotel WiFi, this is the reason I tend to stay in B&Bs run as small family businesses rather than chain hotels like Travelodge. Firstly, the "low price" chain hotels are only low price for a vanishing minority of customers, most the time you book the £19 offer isn't actually on. The "low price" hotels are o

When's the last time you were off line for any significant amount of time?

That's not really the issue, and just FYI the parent is being a little bit of a troll by calling it "DRM". The issue is that even when you play in single player mode, your city is still influenced (to a certain degree) by the Global Economy comprised of all cities, everywhere. The Global System is actually run by Maxis on their servers, so even when playing by yourself you need to be able to reach their servers. Think about that statement carefully- if you are offline, you're screwed. If Maxis goes offline, you're screwed. If they take the servers down, you're screwed. Not only is it no offline play, but even "solo" play is not truly 100% solo.

Now it is true that it's perfectly possible for Maxis to allow an offline mode where the Global Economy is simulated locally, but they seem to have decided that's not a viable option. It also looks like there will be no God Mode Terrain editing prior to starting a city or region, and also no ability to make custom maps and scenarios won't exist either. My suspicion is that they are doing things this way in order to prevent people from being able to manipulate the global marketplace unfairly, for example by editing a new city full of nothing but power plants, which would depress the prices for power across the Global Economy due to the sudden increase in production. But again, they could have given us options to make and play cities completely solo- but they did not.

Since Maxis keeps ignoring the concerns of the fanbase (their forums are a major mess) I think I'm going to have to take a pass on this one, at least until someone puts out software to simulate the Maxis servers, etc.

To be fair, that's not DRM so much as it is a completely server-side gama (ala Diablo 3). To be sure it makes for an effective DRM scheme, but the seamless MP direction they are going for with SC required a server-side game anyhow.

I suspect Valve will surprise us this year. We know they have their Steam console coming out this year. But the XBox 720 and Playstation 4 are also coming out.

So Valve has to be running right out of the gate. My hunch is that they have Half-Life 3, Left 4 Dead 3, Team Fortress 3, perhaps even Portal 3 either sitting on the shelf, or close enough that they could ship within a few months. Those title are to Valve what Mario is to Nintendo, or Halo is to XBox. Drop them all at once, and I suspect you'l sell a fark-ton of Valve boxes overnight.

The Wii U doesn't have a particularly impressive CPU compared to the 360 or PS3, but its GPU is notably better (which is sort of an embarrassing position for the "hardcore gaming" consoles to be in) and - possibly most critically - it has vastly more RAM. In 2005, 512MB of RAM was an acceptable amount for a gaming system. Today, it's a low-end smartphone... or a "serious" gaming console. Consoles could do *so* much with more RAM. Even if it's not used for anything more than heavy background pre-caching to e

If you want to play either of these games, go fire up DOSBox and play the originals. Yes, the originals. In DOS. At 320x480 or 640x480 resolution.

If you're not open minded enough to take a nice retro trip into the past and enjoy yourself, fine- go play the next CoD game, I'm sure they're looking for fresh meat. If you're sick and tired of all this modern shit like I am, then DOSBox (or Boxer if you're on Mac OS X) is a wonderful vacation from the horrific nature of modern day grindfests.

SimCity 2000 may be simple, but it's clean and efficient and rewarding to play. There's no random bullshit like "atmospheric quality" driving down the cost of your land or stupid in-game region restrictions preventing the construction of skyscrapers.

And C&C... Man, the original is a work of art. The music, sound effects, graphics, and full-motion videos- amazing. Even the game installer is awesome (it's all animated and stuff if you've never seen it before- the first sound I ever heard a computer make was EVA saying "Sound hardware initialized" during the installation after I bought my first PC and a copy of what would later be renamed C&C Tiberium Dawn).

This modern day shit that EA has their hands over is all poo. SimCity 5 is an online-based game, and you can't escape the online features (some of which influence your game). Command and Conquer has never been the same since Red Alert 3 and C&C 3 (don't even talk to me about C&C 4- that game was such a bastardization of the franchise it deserves to be filed on the same shelf as Renegade).

So, seriously, if you're looking at the list of games we're getting in 2013 and thinking "What is this mindless clusterfuck of dead franchises and crippled games for people who don't appreciate a proper challenge", then take a trip back in time and play the originals. You'll enjoy them more then this cookie cutter bullshit EA is busy grunting out.

I quite enjoyed the CoD Modern Warfare games, and was enthralled by the fact that they play more like a movie than a game. On higher difficulty levels they were hard enough to be challenging, and had better plots than many games I've played (because let's be honest: Video game storylines nearly always suck, and the ones that were extremely good for video games pale in comparison to books or movies/TV).

Actually, disagree a bit on C&C. The original is a hugely important game. In many ways, it's more the "true" father of the modern RTS than Dune 2. While Dune 2 gets the credit in most accounts, what people forget is that it lacked two absolutely key, defining features of every RTS made since Command & Conquer - drag-click unit selection and multiplayer. Without drag-click selection, Dune 2 became a nightmare to play once your army grew in size beyond a dozen or so units.

Except as I said before, there's no drag-clicking (or any other form of multiple unit selection). So if you want to send a large group of units across the map, you have to tell each one to move individually. Co-ordinated attacks in the later missions become all but impossible. The AI labours under no such restriction. Dune 2 was a stepping stone towards the modern RTS, C&C was the first true modern RTS.

It's amazing how many people swear blind that Dune 2 had drag-clicking - I suspect most of them are ba

It's true for the Amiga version as well. And for the (little remembered) Genesis version. The game's whole UI and menu-bar system is designed around single unit control.

The other odd thing about Dune 2, compared to more modern RTSes, is that the fog of war doesn't get re-covered after being explored once. This was also true for C&C - the modern idea of RTS fog of war didn't get introduced until Warcraft 2, although the much earlier proto-RTS Battletech 2 did something similar, where the player could see

And then Starcraft took a step back and only let you select 12 units at a time. Moving frrom C&C where you could select as many units as you wanted to, and move them across the map, to Starcraft, where you could only select 12 units at a time, was quite painful.

Yes, that was deeply odd in Starcraft (and is one of the reasons why I never warmed to the game). See, I can understand why you might not need to be able to select many units in some RTSes - the likes of Mech Commander or Dawn of War 2, where the emphasis is on making best use of a small number of units. In fact, if you're playing Dawn of War 2 on anything above Easy difficulty and you find yourself drag-clicking multiple units, you're doing something wrong.

Star Wars 1313: 'Early glimpses suggest the game will ignore lightsabers and force powers in favor of gadgetry and guns, and the claims are for a more grounded and gritty fiction, instead of the fruity pan-galactic melodrama to which we are accustomed.'

A linear shooter.

The Elder Scrolls Online: 'The real reason to watch The Elder Scrolls Online is the talent behind it – the ex-Mythic developers responsible for the innovative Warhammer: Age of Reckoning and, before that, Dark Age of Camelot.

Another MMO brought to you by the guys that had NPCs standing 100% still, not moving at all, with no aggro range when they released Warhammer Online. Also, the quests were completely linear too. Considering the quality of their past efforts I think I'll pass.

Mars: War Logs: 'Say it with me: a cyberpunk RPG set on Mars. That's all you need to know.'

Impossible to judge anything about this game with this description. Since its all I need to know then apparently I don't need to figure out if its worth playing..

Ring Runner: 'Missions challenge you to escape exploding trenches, battle bosses bigger than your screen, race against NPC pilots and engage in spectacular space skirmishes in an engine modeled on the laws of Newtonian physics.'

Pretty much every collision library (and thus almost all 3D games) out the

If they ever get released, THQ filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on December 19th. Presumably they'll try to monetize whatever developed IP is left, so we may yet get a release but I'm not holding my breath.

Well, Rome Total War 2 isn't a THQ game, so no need to worry there. And CoH 2 is so far along in development that even if THQ tanks, it's all but guaranteed that whoever buys the rights will pay Relic the (relatively) small amount that it will take to finish the game, and reap the profits. I have no doubt that we will see CoH 2, regardless of what happens with THQ.

The rise of the HUTS expansion is coming out! I know those who played it just for 24 hours dumped it because it didn't have 7 years of updates like Wow, but it has improved and I actually like it and consider it a success regardless of everyone trying to make it a failure.

I look forward to playing it. FYI I have flashpoints, dungeon finders, and other things to do after I cap now. I think it got shafted by Wow users and management at EA before it hit the light of day.

As promising as the one sentence description in the summary sounds, keep in mind that its being directed by Dominic Robilliard, the man behind The Force Unleashed 2. TFU2, you might remember, was a mediocre action game with a story that was ridiculous even by the standards of the Star Wars franchise, which already has more than its fair share of bad writing. It was rightly critically panned, and as far as I know sales weren't that hot either.

If the guy behind a game that Joystiq called [joystiq.com] "glorified fan fic

Dark Age of Camelot managed to survive for years and multiple expansions, despite Mythic's relentless inability to tune the game's main draw, massive realm-vs-realm PVP conflict. Warhammer Online's population more than halved in less than a year for the exact same reason. EA kept them on to develop content for Ultima Online, which has become what the Sims Online wishes it could have been, and virtually nothing came of that either. Seeing them attached to a big, risky project like this makes me wince.

The games are not particularly improving in any way and the 2011 games are going cheap and have been bug-fixed and the DLCs are often all thrown in for free, So, what are the best 20 games of 2011, that is honestly what I'd prefer to know.

Just got the demo CD. Hopeless Masquerade is going to be the best 2D fighter this year.
BTW if anyone is interested in future PC games I highly recommend this blog [wordpress.com]. May not be perfect but it is light years ahead the (mostly)disgusting list in the summary.

It's a high-budget theme park MMO in a world where launching those successfully is extremely difficult and the failure rate is very high. See: Pretty much every MMO that tried to launch in 2012. Particularly the subscription ones.

The market for these games stopped growing a while ago, and the players that are still around are so entrenched in their chosen game that prying them away is also pretty hard to do. If they were making a fairly modest budget game, it might have a shot. As it stands now, I just hope

I can't be the only one that thought Shadows of the Empire on N64 was a good game, surely they can bring out more like this with todays graphics... I don't care much about strict canon as long as its fun.

My big problem with the way they've taken Star Wars from the moment the prequels started to come out is that it stopped being a franchise about a neat dark-ish sci-fi fantasy world and became a story about magical space wizards.

Some of the best Star Wars games ever made (the X-Wing and TIE Fighter games and the original Dark Forces) didn't feature a single lightsabre. Returning to those roots feels like a step in the right direction.

Buy Skyrim and mod it accordingly if you need fornicating polygons. They got lizard people on cat action, too. And dead people doing the nasty.

On the first day there was the Dragonborn. And Bethesda saw that it was good.
On the second day there was The Construction kit. And Bethesda was pleased.
On the third day there were hordes of naked people shouting at dragons and clubbing them to death with giant purple dildos. And Bethesda recieved all Game of the Year awards known to man.

Isn't that the SEGA which has caused some fraudulent DMCA takedown bruhaha a couple of weeks ago? They haven't done anything to personally endear them of late and made them selves at home with the likes of UBI, EA and Activision.
Anybody who trebuchets lawyers at their own fanbois must have gone off the deep end. I wouldn't trust them with my time and my money.

Westwood is dead and BioWare is going the same way. In the "best" case the name will stick around for a while as a front for EA, of all the actual talent nobody still works at BioWare and hasn't for a while (which I personally think should be pretty obvious if you look at their latest releases).

MMOwise I only have some faith in World of Darkness as far as mainstream releases go, it's the only game developed by a company known for successfully running a not-a-dime-a-dozen-MMO game for years (EVE is turning 1

Ha! Elder Scrolls online only has the potential to fall and fall hard, just like Pathfinder Online. Everquest Next is going to crush everything in its way. It also wont be out until late 2014 at the earliest though.